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Another Look at the Financial Transactions Tax

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash A small financial transactions tax could correct a number of maladies in our economic system, from the federal debt crisis to the widening wealth divide to the rampant financialization of the economy, while eliminating taxes on income and sales. The debt ceiling crisis has again brought into focus the […]
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Steering the Titanic into the Iceberg
Patty Chayefsky’s film Network, an acid-laced spoof of capitalist media, reaches its climax when Chairman Arthur Jensen, leader of the fictional mega-corporation CAA, thunders his disapproval to the crazed but wildly popular anchorman, Howard Beale. Encouraging his viewers to protest CAA’s unpatriotic merger deal with Saudi Arabian capitalists, Jensen accuses Beal of having “meddled with […]
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West Failed to Depose Erdogan Despite Openly Backing Opposition

Although Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory in the second round of the presidential election in Turkey is almost assured ahead of the second round of votes, opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, in case of victory, would alter the country’s foreign policy and put the relationship with Russia into a framework that is acceptable to the US. The […]
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The Work That Tricontinental Does

I am grateful to you for reading this newsletter, which has been coming to you since March 2018 and which now – thanks to the efforts of our movements – reaches over a million people. Our first newsletter posed a problem that remains at the heart of our institute’s work: The Left has before us […]
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The End of an Era
Why do the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank– three of the most highly regarded international economic organizations-project a bleak road ahead for the global economy? Ominously, the World Bank warns of the possibility of a coming “lost decade” for economic growth. In January of this year, the […]
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Playing with Financial Fire
Capitalism, Marx said, is unceasingly prone to crisis. His observation applies as much to financial capital as to industrial capital, as the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank of New York attest. In their pursuit of profits, banks make loans that borrowers cannot repay or back the loans with assets that lose […]
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Banking Crisis 3.0: Time to Change the Rules of the Game

On CNN March 14, Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said that American banks were on the verge of being nationalized: What the authorities did over the weekend was absolutely profound. They guaranteed the deposits, all of them, at Silicon Valley Bank. What that really means … is that they have […]
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Standing Together: Resisting the New Normal
The US wanted Russia to attack Ukraine. So says Robert H Wade, professor of Global Political Economy at the London School of Economics. And then it brought in its wide-ranging sanctions regime in response. According to renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, the US subsequently blew up the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The result is that […]